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Pre-2011 Macs store the system password in a very insecure way which permits easy password recovery if the user can boot into the system and has root / Administrator priviledges. This post details how to simply erase or recover that system password. Continue reading →

TeXstudio is a decent and free TeX editor on the Mac. One aspect of it bothered me, though: It uses too much CPU for no obvious reason. Even when no tex documents are open, it (version 2.10.8) does *something* very CPU intensive every ~8 seconds. On a desktop computer this wouldn’t be much of a hassle, but on a laptop unnecessary mean wasted energy and less battery life. With TeXstudio on a MacBook Pro it actually means several hours less battery life.

Using the Activity Monitor I found TeXstudio to frequently scan for network interfaces and nearby Wifi networks. That is very odd for a TeX editor and I cannot think of a good reason for it to do so.

There are plenty of reasons to tunnel one network connection through another without encryption: You might, for instance, want to transparently connect two separate networks (e.g. data centers) through another, or want to use a publicly reachable IP address behind your providers NAT. Whatever the reason is, what you are going to do is to encapsulate your data within IP packets to pass through the transit network to your other tunnel endpoint. While it is out of question that this works (this has been a solved problem for a while), this article will look at the performance of various tunneling methods on a very, very low-end consumer-grade device: A TP-Link WR841N v9 wireless router. This device costs less than €15 and is still a very capable router because it can run the versatile open-source OpenWRT operating system.